Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Make no mistake: What happened in South Carolina … was a moral reprimand delivered to Bill and Hillary Clinton by a united Democratic Party--but especially by the African-American segment of that party. …

A mass, unspoken decision had been made that Bill and Hillary Clinton had behaved unjustly toward Barack Obama. ...

Obama struck precisely the right note in his victory speech, skewering the Clintons without naming them. And it seems to me that when he says that the election is a contest between "the past and the future," he is describing a situation that becomes truer every day, as the Clintons' vestigial political virtuosity becomes more creaky and transparent, and just seems out-of-date and distasteful in a party that may want to turn the page on all that. ...

Klein’s “moral reprimand” included his assertion “that the entire country [may be] tired of the pestilence of [the Clintons'] tactical tricks.”

Several people, including former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet and, later, Vassar professor Donald Foster correctly identified Klein as the novel's author, based on a literary analysis of the book and Klein's previous writing.

Klein denied the results and publicly condemned Foster.

Klein misdirected further in Newsweek, speculating that another writer wrote it.

Washington Post Style editor David von Drehle, in an interview, asked Klein if he was willing to stake his journalistic credibility on his denial, to which Klein agreed.

“Misdirected” seriously understates what Klein actually did.

At the time a Newsweek columnist, Klein went for weeks telling his readers, editors and fellow journalists that he wasn’t the author of Primary Colors. They could trust him on that, Klein insisted. He reminded everyone he was "a journalist who told the truth."

When the truth came out, Klein had to resign from Newsweek.

But he’s a liberal/leftist and, things being as they are in the liberal/left MSM world, it wasn’t too long before Klein surfaced as a columnist for the liberal/leftist TIME where he recently delivered his "moral repirmand" of the Clintons.